Proprietary software vendors cannot be trusted to put your interests first. If they can get away with it they will always put their interests first. But, of course, their interests will remain well protected.

I agree that Open Source is no different. But I think it's harder to get away with it because it's harder to hide what you're doing. And even if you do for a time, someone will come along and fix it, and if you don't accept their fix you'll lose your users to the fork.

Open source is different in that anyone peeved about some missing or unfriendly feature can implement it. You do not need to become an official committer; just put your patch on the mailing list and it is likely to be picked up and integrated.

Open source is different in that people generally strive to build the best software they can; there is no management saying "This is good enough; we're not going to bother with feature/problem X", or worse, as in this case, "there is no problem X".

AbstractTraditionally, when individuals wanted online access they connected their PCs to the internet. Now, non-traditional devices such as cell phones, smart phones, and gaming consoles serve as common means of

"Performing a fast scan on one of the drives resulted in a possible credit card hit as demonstrated in Image 10."

While they conclude that it's likely this is a credit card, based on the card identifier (first four numbers) and that it matches the Luhn algorithm (mis-spelt as "Luhr" in the article - that took a while to figure out!), however the Luhn algorithm isn't designed for this sort of use, it's primarily there to catch data entry mistakes. I'm fairly happy that the chances of a match like this on a multi-GB hard drive are fairly good, just through random chance. A good follow-up experiment here would be to buy new XBox 360s, buy points and then scan the hard drive for the card used.

IMHO their points raised about finding gamer tags, friend lists, etc. are probably far more relevant, especially in relation to this data not being destroyed when a factory reset is done.

There's some really odd bits, though... "In this particular instance, we can see NAT (Network Address Translation) rules for a site called Bungle.net[sic], where Halo players can have their stats tracked or purchase games and merchandise [36]." - which as far as I can tell is actually a list of errors you can get if your NAT setup is causing problems.

I'd also be more confident if the work had less odd errors; "Book and Nuke, by DBAN is", presumably refers to "Darik's Boot and Nuke", frequently abbreviated to "DBAN".

The so-called "Factory Reset" on the 360 doesn't do anything. It blows away a few settings, but the majority of the Flash NAND that everything else is stored in remains untouched- that is, the data is still there- just not in any reference-able format (this is analogous to unlinking a file- the data is still there, just not listed in the filesystems TOC).

If you really want to nuke a 360, you need to go into the System Info page (the one with the console serial numbers, kernel version, etc)- then enter in a combination of button presses that is usually specific to your console or the machine model (nobody has really figured that one out). Usually this combination starts with LT, LR, X, Y, LB, RB- but then there's anywhere between 2 and 8 additional button events. You might be able to guess it with some patience, I've done it before- but I think that was just blind luck (in my case, the remaining buttons to press were on the D-Pad- up, down, left, right, then the X, Y, A, and B buttons).

If you call Microsoft, they can usually get you the combo for your console if you make up a story about losing the parental controls or some bullshit (they won't just give it to you if you ask for it- they want a reason).

Once you do that, you'll get a screen that will basically confirm you really, really want to blow the console away. If you confirm, the 360 will reset itself to the actual factory state- that is, all your HDMI settings, wireless settings, account information- everything will be nuked.

But the publicly available "factory reset"- the one you can get to without any secret combos or anything, isn't really a reset. A lot of settings will linger around, and the only way to nuke them totally is with the aforementioned wipe.

And why all that? Microsoft has no involvement in you selling your Xbox. If it has some data on there that you don't want others to know it's your fault. Not like "you can wipe this clean and sell it" is listed as a feature.

And why all that? Microsoft has no involvement in you selling your Xbox. If it has some data on there that you don't want others to know it's your fault. Not like "you can wipe this clean and sell it" is listed as a feature.

What is wrong with you exactly? You are clearly damaged in some way.

First Sale Doctrine: I buy shit from you, the shit is mine now, I sell shit to someone else. You don't get to stop or interfere with that.Sorry but I like liberty and being free. I don't want to live in a nation where all my stuff belongs to the aristocracy and I'm just renting it from them at their pleasure, that's just slavery in a different name.

You are correct, it's your shit now. Microsoft isn't stopping you from selling your shit. It's like bitching that the dealership won't help you transfer the title on the car you bought from them when you sell it to someone else several years later. It's your job to deal with that because it's your shit now.

Straight wiping of a 360 hard drive will destroy it for future 360 use. The hard drive security sector (hddss.bin) is stored on the disk and, if erased, will render the hard drive useless on a stock 360 console. The security sector cannot be "spoofed" or otherwise as each hddss.bin is unique to the specific hard drive on which it resides. Only by backing up the specific sectors where hddss.bin is stored before wiping, then restoring them afterward, will keep the hard drive usable in a 360 console.

There are hacking tools to convert non-360 hard drives into usable drives, but not Microsoft OEM drives. I can't believe the researchers recommended a straight wipe without this caveat.

Oh, sorry about the ruckus. Those loud guffaws were just rms feeling vindicated again.:P

--okay, maybe the 360 shouldn't be full-on free software, but they really should ship HDD-reset CD thingers to properly wipe the disc so we don't turn our HDDs into blank coasters (from the console POV anyway) when this sort of wipe becomes necessary.

TFA: Performing a fast scan on one of the drives resulted in a possible credit card hit as demonstrated in Image 10. Although this does not definitively prove there are any credit card numbers on the hard drive, it is highly probable given the results obtained. The Bank Identification Number in this hit identifies this as a Bank of America Discover Card [37].

That's a solid find. Except for the fact that I can't find the option to enter in a Discover card to Xbox Live for it to store. Chances of this being a real valid Discover card number? I'd put it right around the same as/dev/urandom.

Yeah, I thought the same. XBL purchases come out of your MSPoints wallet, which is (logically enough) stored in XBL, not the console - you can purchase stuff through the xbox.com website too, and stuff gets downloaded when you turn the console on again. Credit card info is stored on XBL too, as far as I can boundlessly speculate. Wouldn't make much sense to store it on the console, especially since the XBL account is not tied to a specific console.

Woah! I was getting a bit creeped out by some of the more paranoid comments from our brethren and just at the right/wrong moment a junior spider abseils off my ceiling light across the room and onto my keyboard. The slightest movement of my hand makes it scurry in and under the ] (right angle bracket) key. It shall feast well tonight!

Not surprising, if the user had reversible encryption enabled or you have physical access and can overwrite the hashed password with an arbitrary value. Of course, if the user ticked the box "Encrypt contents to secure data", or enabled Bitlocker full disk encryption, your "boot-cd" would be completely useless.

The PCI-DSS spec is used by organizations to evaluate their infrastructure as to whether it is in compliance. I've read the entire v2 doc before, and unlike most technical specifications it is more of a best practices guide for secure transport and storage for PCI data. This includes everything from switches, routers, servers, to tape backup and everything in between.
In Microsoft's case this includes the Xbox itself and everything within their datacenters that PCI data flows through. Part of the spec s

You store a KEY locally - which has cryptographic validation - but is not cryptographically derived from any actual card data itself. This token is stored, and can be used in place of the card info - which is stored per PCI-DSS specs, in the commerce infrastructure.

Their advice is worth bearing in mind for desktop computers too, not just XBox 360s

"I think Microsoft has a longstanding pattern of this," Podhradsky said. "When you go and reformat your computer, like a Windows system, it tells you that all of your data will be erased. In actuality that's not accurate—the data is still available... so when Microsoft tells you that you're resetting something, it's not accurate."

Any one of two dozen drive over-write utilities (free or paid) will make sure your drive is unreadable.

No need for multiple passes either, simply write binary zeros everywhere and you are done. The old FUD about the CIA recovering [nber.org] your info with electron microscopes is pure bull, and nobody has ever once successfully demonstrated that in public even when they had access to state of the art university electron microscopes.

> dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdx bs=1MUse "hdparm --security-erase..." instead. Apart from being faster, it will erase the entire disk, including any sectors which have been remapped, and will work on damaged disks (i.e. it won't abort or perform retries on write errors).

The only thing people "know" about the CIA's abilities is whatever Hollywood dreams up for movies and TV gimmicks.

As an outsider, my caricatured perception of government intelligence is a bunch of failed lawyers tallying various stats and counting down the minutes to their next smoke break. Recovering data from an erased hard drive seems well beyond the reach of any federal employee I've ever met. Maybe the top engineers at Western Digital could pull it off, but they have better things to do like cramming

All that has ever been demonstrated is that with an electron microscope a couple of bytes were successfully "raised" after being over written with a uniform pattern. The prior content of the drive was known, which is how they were able to determine that they weren't recovering noise. It was a proof of concept recovery of literally a few bytes from a drive with known content overwritten with known content. This was the topic of a guy named Venugopal Veeravalli, for his Masters t

"When you go and reformat your computer, like a Windows system, it tells you that all of your data will be erased.

It's true though... when you reformat your computer you logically have a blank slate.
Everything IS erased, it's just that some of the old data might not be irrecoverably destroyed,
especially if you choose a quick format where you just get a clean filesystem w/clean volume metadata
without going through every disk sector and zeroing or even clearing out directory tables..

You can put a piece of paper through a shredder but if the shredder ONLY has that piece of paper and i have the time i can put that paper back together, so does that mean you didn't actually shred it? what we really need is different words here, erased VS erased and possibly recontructable would probably be better descriptions.

What Windows does when you format is erase the Master File Table [microsoft.com] or MFT. Once the MFT is gone NTFS and the OS above it simply can't find any former files because without a pointer t

That's just an attack on Microsoft. Formatting does not erase your data, it erases the metadata, (re)initializing the filesystem structures to a clean, possibly blank state. The raw data remains, but since you no longer have an index to tell you where each file begins, how big it is and what it's called, you have no easy way to access it.

With many filesystems, this metadata exists in several places and usually has one or more backup copies. A "quick" format tends to kill the main index, leaving the backu

I also thought the CC info was stored on Microsoft's servers. You can't even buy stuff on an Xbox without being logged into your Live account.

The point, I think, is that it's naive not to assume some engineer decided to store the info in *both* places. If you were trying to make the customer experience as smooth as possible, and you had 99% confidence that the home box was in possession of the Real User, you might want to make the process a little more "foolproof".

Say the billing server glitches and corrupts their copy of the CC... Poll the console, get the number, transaction approved. The alternative is pop up a CC entry screen, which has a non-zero chance to frustrate the Real User to the point of cancelling the sale. Bad for a market built on instant gratification.

Any goodheart engineer who cries foul from a system security training point of view, has probably never had to answer to a Director more concerned with their department operating at a loss for years. Xbox division regularly dipped into and out of the red until the last couple of years.

And the bigger point is, with all the revisions to the Dashboard, it may be impossible to know when this purported "feature" was added, taken away, or actively used. I bet you 2800 MS Points that the next dash update roots out and purges this data. Won't stop the class-actions though.

Such a flaw is as stupid an idea as forgetting about leap years - twice running, or letting image viewers run arbitrary code embedded in images. Only a highly unprofessional software vendor would allow such a thing out into the wild after QC testing.It's funny how just saying it as it is comes out as Microsoft bashing. A bit more testing on such show stopping bugs, probably only a handful more employees, and we wouldn't have these things to complain about.

It's absolutely far-fetched. But so were black swans.;) I certainly agree with your conclusion.

1) I'm not making any realistic claims about the technology or the engineer's actions. I'm devil's advocating that Director of X is so worried about losing a sale they insist on a ridiculous layer of redundancy. It's not likely, but it is most definitely plausible. (Unless you're defending the intelligence of Microsoft management? oh snap!) And even though this story is about Xbox, information gets exposed elsewh

Say the billing server glitches and corrupts their copy of the CC... Poll the console, get the number, transaction approved. The alternative is pop up a CC entry screen

That doesn't make any sense at all. Microsoft's database framework: Microsoft SQL, Jet DB, SQL Azure... doesn't "corrupt" a copy of things in a database Microsoft's database system is a Tier1 application. If corruption was ever a significant issue they would have much larger problems on their hands, because they wouldn't be able to

No company I've ever worked for has had an SQL server "corrupt" a database. Ever. The only thing even remotely similar was a disk failure, caused by shitty HP hardware, and recovered in an hour without even going to backups thanks to hotswapping disks in the RAID array.

Yep it makes 0 logical sense to store any credit card information locally on an xbox, I can't imagine Microsoft would make such a silly mistake. It would be like Valve storing credit card info for steam on the PC it is installed on.

"It makes sense to store valuable information on xboxes, just like Microsoft Windows versions which retain a lot of information unless you use CCLeaner"

How, and why, does it make sense to store "valuable" information? And, who determines what "valuable" means, anyway? Personally, I store almost nothing on my machine. And, Microsoft doesn't store ANYTHING on my machine. I dumped Windows years ago, when I discovered how easy it is to retrieve data that most people don't even know is saved.

How EXACTLY is this flamebait? he provided the link to the response from MSFT who says their software doesn't store locally so we have one saying A and another saying B, so logically one would suggest that waiting until we had a separate source test and verify the findings would be the best course of action. Or does a post not count if it isn't following the correct groupthink? Last I checked the banner read "News For Nerds" not "self affirming circlejerking" ala Faux news and MSNBC. The only compliant i ca